I'm not sure I would call the steps "reasonable" per se. They're much more obviously bad ideas in retrospect than they were at the time, but a lot of them should have been pretty obviously bad ideas at the time as well.

On the HTTP is slow thing: I think I was pretty clear in the write up that we had failed to performance test and it wasn't at all clear that our replacement was faster. I think these are sufficient disclaimers that I was pretty obviously labelling it "HEY DON'T DO IT THIS WAY" :-)